Monday, December 26, 2011

More Prep for Glass

I can't believe that is has been 6 months since I last posted but there goes the time I guess.
There have been other projects on the front burner that are now completed so, with good weather here in Phoenix, I am able to get back to the boat. This is the 4th and final day of my Christmas weekend so I am planning to get to it when I finish this post.


In prepping the entire Deck/Hull join for glassing the entire join in one go, I found an actual split in the hull immediately below the Deck/Hull join on the starboard side about 3 feet aft of the bow. After cleaning and sanding the outer hull, I half crawled under the bow deck and cut away the 2 " diameter line of foam from the area. I intend to glass the inside first and then do the outside to insure a strong seal.





I also removed the rotted wood from the bulkhead immediately forward of the transom. That well is where the water drains from the cockpit and then runs out through the transom drain. I want to somehow install self draining ports through this area (cockpit to & through the transom) but I will have to put the boat in the water to mark the outer water line before I will be able to determine if this is even possible. If it is not, then I will install a PVC pipe (Y configuration) to run the water from the cockpit through this rear well. I imagine a shut off valve in place of the drain plug in this line just forward of the actual drain through the transom. I can then put a removable floor in this rear well above the drain line. The bulkhead will be filled in with fiberglass (I saw a restoration on You Tube that used the fiberglass from pipe insulation that was saturated with resin and gave a thickened bulk when cured)  and perhaps even strengthened with a thin (3/8") piece plywood.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBit-dYDGLs

Before Prep





After Prep



Then there remains the floor under the bow deck. It is pretty rough and will need to be sanded and covered with mat & glass. In and under the front seat is the wooden cradle that houses the keel stepped mast foot. I will have to remove this in order to complete the under foredeck floor repair. I really want to make the mast "deck stepped" and that will require a portion of deck to be constructed just above the front seat This would then require the removal of the front seat, it being of no further use and the extending up wards of the bulkhead that supports the rear of the front seat. That is a bit ambitious at the moment but we shall see when I get here. I only need about 2' of deck added on to the existing deck but it would have to be strong enough to support the mast. Another project for another day but always in the back of my mind.  

                                                    <<<<<<<  Stern  /  Bow  >>>>>>> 


                                                     Floor under the bow                                                                              
Mast foot step & wooden cradle under the front seat
                                                          From the bow well looking aft 
                          

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Learning the Hard Way



I am still having a lot of trouble making this a clean “fitted” job.
And after talking to my buddy Jorge in Mobile, AL, he said I should be using West Marine. I take it he means epoxy rather than polyester resin. He said it will not set as fast and will give me a better long term join. So I have changed direction.

I went to Home Depot this morning and bought some light weight fiberglass cloth. I cut a 2 foot strip, 2 inches wide and with the polyester resin, applied a very clean join. I will continue to do that around the deck hull seam. It goes on easy and will hold the seam in place without any clamps.

Then I will sand the edges down to have room for a matt overlap. To make the turn around the join, I will fray the edge of the matt and epoxy that around the bend, first one direction (down) and then the other direction (up). I will get some epoxy and use that for the outer layer of matt. I think this might be overkill, but when it is finished, I defy any wave to shake it apart (unless I am in water that I shouldn’t be in anyway!) 




110 degrees here today. It’s very hard to get any chores done, let alone any work on the boat done mid day. Nobody walks anywhere here mid day………………….Oh Yes, we have dust storms here as well. If you can imagine the first snow with a soft thin blanket of white…….think brown dust instead of white snow! This is not from the movie “The Mummy”, this is real…………………I slept through it, didn’t hear a thing!



Saturday, July 2, 2011

Deck to Hull Join

First things first. I took a hose to the boat inside and out. It looked like it had been sitting for a couple years and out here in the desert, a layer of dust is a daily occurrence. Once the boat was washed down, I had a good look around. There are several items I want to attend to but the first structural thing I noticed was a bulge in the rub rail 5 feet back from the bow on the port side. It looked like the boat had rammed a dock or piling. The previous repair was made with a load of silicone in the space between the top of the rub rail and side of the boat. So I removed the entire rub rail from the boat. On further inspection, I found the deck & hull had separated about ¾ inch for about 2 ½ feet along the port side. 

 
It seems that the entire boat was joined with small ¼ inch staples. The same staples were used to fix the rub rail to the deck/hull join. If it weren’t for the expanded foam inside the deck/hull join, I doubt if the deck would have made it this long. All the staples were rusted out and the ones that I couldn’t pull out were simply deteriorated to the point of mere rust spots.



So I decided to make a fiberglass join around the entire boat. The rub rail seemed in reasonable condition but I have yet to clean and recondition it.



So the question now was just how to glass the join. I have read various things about the differences between polyester resin and epoxy. So I hauled my boat over to a fiberglass supplier, “Sticky Stuff”, in Glendale (immediately west of Phoenix) for some answers. I was told that I needed to use polyester resin with fiberglass matt. So I bought some matt, resin, hardener and the rest of the stuff (gloves, brushes, etc.).

I bought some 2 foot long clamps at Home Depot and started to work. I had a major problem getting the matt to turn around the lip at the join. The matt was too thick for me to get right (1 ½ oz). The first attempt I mixed way too much resin and laid out a 4 foot strip of matt. It went so badly, I had to sand all of it off the next day. So I decided to try 8 inch strips of matt at a time. The resin lasted just long enough to manage that length before starting to set up and go to gel. Still a really messy job. But it did work and I am working my way along the join. I lightly sand the previous day’s piece and re-resin while I am doing the next strip. 



I really can’t imagine doing the entire boat like this. There has to be an easier way but I am committed to making the entire boat’s deck/hull join secure. I want this boat to stay together in heavy seas. So it goes.

I am considering using a light application of fiberglass Bondo putty to even out the join followed by a wider strip of cloth this time (rather than matt). I will have to wait and see, but that is where I am headed.

It is that time of evening again when the temperature outside has dropped from 115 degrees to just about 100 degrees so I am headed out to do the next strip of matt.


Chrysler LS-16 "Sea Swallow"

I found a small sailboat on Craigslist. It was listed for $750. Still a bit pricy for me but I thought I had better go have a look. When I got there, I was really taken with this boat. It was perfect for my purposes. It was 16 foot and I had already handled an 18 foot easily. It had no cabin which meant it had lots of cockpit space, enough for 4 adults and lots of room for just me or me and a “friend”. Though, I found out later through research, it was near 40 years old, the hull was in great shape. Having retractable keels and rudder, it would stand in 6” of draft. And the keels were bilge keels, being under the seats leaving the center walkway completely open. WOW! In thinking of a boom tent, I would have lots more cabin space than I ever had in my Laguna 18 while being able to Creek Crawl as some dinghy cruisers call it, that is navigating up into what is called shallow creeks, bayous, or sloughs depending which local you ware in. It is rated for a 9.9 HP outboard if you can even imagine such power on this boat. I think a 4.5 will do just fine. All the rigging and sails as well as life vests were all there too.

I asked for the bottom price and the gentleman said “How about $550?” I paid cash and hauled it home on a very nice, albeit rusty, trailer, lights and all. So here we are, in my front yard (too big to get into the house!). I put the old 10’ dinghy on Craigslist and sold it. A man came looking for a project for his two teenage sons. He said they had just stripped, rebuilt and reassembled an old ATV and were starting to eyeball the stuff in his garage. So for $100 I let it go. I only lost about $350 but when one is in love AGAIN, one doesn’t quibble over a lost love. Well, not me anyway.



So I started to take inventory of the boat, repairs required, etc.
It is actually sail-able now but I want to restore it completely and in fact to customize it some. This blog was intended to get you to here and chronicle my efforts with this new boat, especially for the Chrysler Sailors Forum. So, I hope you will join me on this new adventure in restoring and eventually sailing my perfect Dinghy Cruiser!

She shall bear the name “Sea Swallow”.
I am pretty handy with graphics........
On the Boat:

 T-Shirt Logo:




The Itch to Sail Returns

I made a couple phone calls to Phoenix when I decided I needed to return from Kansas and was assured I had work upon arrival so I loaded up my stuff and my two dogs and headed west. I did fine, working one job 40 hours during the week and another on the weekends. It wasn’t but about 9 months when I got a call from the company I had retired from to say they needed someone to reorganize a department asking if I was interested. I would be “contract” this time but it meant I didn’t have to work the weekends to earn the same money. So I accepted the position. I moved house in another year or so from my old neighborhood in West Mesa to Central Phoenix and felt quite settled again. BUT….. I was starting to feel the itch to sail once again. I had plans (in my head) to retire again in about 7 years and to buy a 32 plus foot boat to live on. The 7 or so years seemed like a long time to wait to get back on the water so I decided to get a small dinghy to sail in the meantime. Something similar to a Walker Bay 10.

I found a 10’ dinghy on Craigslist that had originally been a yacht tender in San Diego and brought out to Phoenix to be used as a small fishing boat in the local lakes. Then a restaurant in Central Phoenix had bought it to decorate their patio. It had been out there for about 6 years and all the wood was gone from the sun but the hull was solid fiberglass and in excellent shape. Again, thinking I could restore it and make a sailing dinghy out of it, I bought it and hauled it home in the back of my 2005 GMC Envoy XUV (the one that has a retractable roof in the back).



It needed a trailer as it was just a bit too big to handle easily so I went to my old neighbor, whom I had given the trailer from the very first worthless catamaran, and he still had it in the back yard. Having done nothing with it, he gladly saw me haul it away. I ground it all down, painted it sparsely, put on lights and licensed it with the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT).



I stripped the boat down to the hull and started reading about fiberglass, intending to rebuild it entirely of glass. I purchased a 12 foot spinnaker pole (thinking it was a boom at the time) for a mast. I bought a main sail & jib all off of Craigslist. I was ready to rebuild. Winter came and went and then it was too hot to work outside here (115 degrees in the summer is not uncommon). So I moved it into my living room for a while. Well I am single and my dogs simply had no say in the matter.



In reading about boat repair, I found my way to dinghy cruising, which is camping out in small sailboats or dinghies with what is called a boom tent. This I thought was exactly the activity I had been looking for. I started to orientate myself in that direction. That plus the very small size of the dinghy I had (in my living room), just didn’t seem like the right fit. So I started looking for another boat that would better suit my purpose.

Enter stage left as they say, again on Craigslist, a Chrysler LS-16. The perfect fit.


Phoenix > Kansas > Phoenix

My life at this point took a turn. I was eligible for retirement at 56 and with an inheritance from a patriarchal Aunt, I sold my house and moved from Phoenix to Kansas. I had never lived in the mid west but had seen quite a bit of it while driving several 3000 mile road trips to attend multiple Martina McBride concerts over the previous couple years. In passing through Martina’s home town on one trip, I fell in love with South Central Kansas. Having found a restaurant for sale from her dad’s first cousin in her home town of Sharon, Kansas, I bought the place and moved. Sharon is about 75 miles West of Wichita and 20 miles North of the Oklahoma state line. There is a huge reservoir, Cheney Reservoir, North West of Wichita with a lively sailing community and I had planned to sail there as soon as I got settled. Meanwhile I moored my boat in a small local lake. 


Well, I never did get around to sailing; I was so busy with the restaurant. In the end, with business so slow, I had to sell the boat to assist the restaurant. I had to sell my Maserati as well, but that is another story.



I placed an ad on Craigslist and sold it to the very nicest couple in Arkansas. I delivered it and after staying the night at their place, took them out in the morning to a local lake, showed them how to rig it and then sail it. This is the last photo of me with my Laguna.



In the end I had to return to Phoenix to work due to lack of business. My time in Kansas will always be one of my most cherished memories. Sitting at my own bar, eating a Rib eye and a baked potato, drinking a Long Neck Beer while listening to Daryl Schiff, Martina’s dad, sing Classic Country, I thought I had died and gone to Country Western Heaven! In fact I am buying a small undeveloped lot in Sharon so when I can’t sail anymore; I will have a place to grow tomatoes!


Hobie Turbo 14 to Laguna 18 Windrose

I spent my first summer sailing my Hobie Turbo 14 in Tempe Town lake and in Lake Pleasant. I used to visit San Diego occasionally to visit my friends Scott & Christine so I took my Cat with me and sailed in Mission Bay. Winds were westerly coming off the ocean steady and true. Sailing north and south in the bay was just a pleasure.



By this time my second summer had arrived and I was ready to learn to trapeze off the hulls. I also wanted to go faster (go figure) so I started looking for a spinnaker…yes for a 14 foot Cat!!! That’s when I found my next boat. I was browsing in the Phoenix Sailboat Shop’s lot on McClintock just north of the 202 freeway. That lot has closed now and they are located at Lake Pleasant. I found the sweetest Laguna 18 Windrose. It was a monohull fixed keel sloop. It was about 20 years old but had been garaged for almost 10 years and in excellent condition. So for $3500 I hauled it home on a titled trailer. It needed nothing really.
So for a short time I had a fleet in my yard what with both the Hobie and Laguna parked next to each other. As my buddy in San Diego volunteered to sell my Cat there, I took it to him and it went in about a week.

The Laguna was named “Second Wind”, a name I still use once in a while but, being a devoted fan of Martina McBride, Country songstress extraordinaire, I renamed the boat “In My Daughter’s Eyes” after one of her songs to match my truck license plate “I M D E“. 





The new boat was like going from a wet Go Cart to a Chevy Suburban. It was 18” off the water with a dry cockpit and stability that I never imagined. It was a real pleasure to sail, fast and responsive on the tiller. I spent a lot of time in it, again on Tempe Town Lake and on Lake Pleasant. The cover photo beneath this blog is of the Laguna on Lake Pleasant.

As the Laguna had a small cabin/galley, I started thinking of living aboard. Even though it was way to small at the time, with a bit more experience and reading, I now know that it wasn’t much too small, just a bit too small. By now Sailing was truly something I was bound to do, one way or another for the rest of my life.

How, Why & When

Thanks for tuning in. This is my first entry and I hope you find this blog easy to read, eventually entertaining and maybe even instructive……..
Sailing is one of my passions. I have been sailing for about 7 years in small sailboats on inland waters. I am a cruiser, not a racer. As to why I began sailing, I guess I have always wanted to sail because of the sense of freedom that comes with the “idea” of sailing. You know, wind is free, and there are no “lanes” painted on the water (well not at first sight anyway). And as complicated as it can be, from an algebraic perspective (that is reduced to its lowest common denominator), it really is just Wind, Sail, Ropes & Pulleys.

In the mid 80s while living in New Orleans, a friend I knew from the “Port of Call”, took a few of us sailing one day. His boat, as near as I can remember, was about a 20 foot sloop and moored in Slidell, just east of New Orleans and across Lake Ponchartrain. We tacked NW & SW to get across the lake to New Orleans East and then ran with the wind back to Slidell. I still remember standing on the transom, holding on to the back stay when the wind came up. The bow dipped, the stern lifted and she just took off. I rode all the way back like that, like I was surfing a wave on a huge surf board. I remember it distinctly as my first experience.

I was no stranger to boats or water as I was doing my Land Surveying apprenticeship there and spent a lot of time in the bays and bayous surveying oyster beds, some time in a small aluminum flat boat taking annual soundings in the Mississippi River and some time in a Pirogue measuring the batture (the land between the River & the levee). But that was nothing like sailing!

My next sail was 10 years later, after I had moved to Phoenix and had taken a vacation back to the Gulf Coast to visit friends. While I was in Mobile visiting my buddy Jorge. Paul, the friend that introduced me to Jorge, took both of us out on his 18’ Catamaran around Dauphin Island. The three of us guys left from the North East end of the Island and sailed around to the South West end where we met the girls for lunch.                                                                                                                                                                          

I didn’t think much about sailing for a few years and then, in 2003, for some reason, I decided that I was going to get a boat and learn. So I traded an old junk car for an old junk Hobie Cat, thinking as I always do, that I could restore it to sailing condition. It didn’t take long to realize it was worthless. So I found my real first boat for $200. A late 70s Hobie 14 Turbo (Turbo had a jib). I had the trampoline sewn as it had a vandalized slice in it. I put about $400 more into it. I watched the video that came with it; put it in the water in Tempe Town Lake in the mid Phoenix Metro area and it did exactly what the video said it would do. After getting what I thought was proficient, I took it up to Lake Pleasant, about 40 miles north of Phoenix. My first day in real wind, my first turtle. YAHOO! I was in heaven. I was hooked on sailing, plain and simple. Man did it fly across the water!  





That’s the how, why and when.